Life is grand

Reading through what SpotPlex, a “better Digg”, is I was once again reminded that we need shared website statistics.

Putting yet another bit of JavaScript into your site is not the answer. I already have Google Analytics plus a few widgets and it slows my pages down. If Spotplex were to have a bad day and I had their JavaScript I may get errors and long waits as URI requests timeout. Plus it is one more vector of attack into my website.

We can go two ways on this sharing idea. Each website can expose a statistics API that allows callers to request certain statistical data or we can setup a central hub that receives stats and shares them out to parties you allow. The central hub can use a stats standard and be open for anyone to run and federate.

There has been plenty of buzz lately about OpenID. I think the idea is very good even though its flexibility (”decentralised”) can make getting your head around it a bit difficult. Once you figure it out though you realise how obvious it is.

Up till now though my main problem with OpenID has been getting my domain, paulmwatson.com, to be my OpenID. I want to login to your system with paulmwatson.com as my ID, username, etc. I once tried to install the server software but that went nowhere and I left it.

Thankfully Simon Willison wrote How to turn your blog into an OpenID which uses a simple (for us techies) meta tag in your HTML to redirect through to an OpenID provider. So I signed up with MyOpenID which is my identity provider but I tell OpenID accepting sites to use paulmwatson.com which routes through to MyOpenID. As Simon points out if I stop trusting MyOpenID or find a better provider all I have to do is change the meta tags and all my dependant services carry on working using paulmwatson.com.

Very nice. Thanks Simon, and thanks for OpenID.